Thanks! pfSense running as virtual under Hyper-V…couldn't be happier
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Just wanted to give a quick thanks. I've been running pfSense as a Hyper-V virtual machine as my primary router at home for roughly 6 months now and I couldn't be happier. In the past 2 years I've got through over 12 hardware routers including some DD-WRT and Cisco gear and have never been happy with the performance, features or reliability.
I finally decided to give pfSense a try and have been extremely happy. I'm running it as a Hyper-V virtual machine on my WK28 R2 server with a dual Intel Pro /1000 PT PCI-E dedicated to it along with 512 MB RAM. My only tweak for running it as a VM was that I needed to release\renew the WAN nic via a startup script otherwise it wouldn't receivea DHCP address. I don't know if that is a problem with Hyper-V, Comcast or pfSense but it was a simple work-around.
I'm hoping to see native *BSD network drivers for Hyper-V but the performance even using the legacy network adapter has been incredible.
Thanks again for a great product
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Thanks for sharing your enthusiasm mikinho! I'm on the verge of joining the pfSense enthusiasts group, but I'm stuck with the same problem as you describe: Hyper-V won't allow communication through the legacy nics to pfSense. I did get it to work once, but for some silly reason, it doesn't work anymore. I'm hoping you will read this message and share your solution using the release/renew WAN script with the rest of the world.
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What are its interface names on Hyper-V and how many does Hyper-V allow you to have per virtual machine?
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Sorry for not responding sooner. I'll post the script when I get home tonight, it simply does a DHCP release and renew on the WAN interface.
In R2 you can have 384 virtual machines and in a Live Cluster environment you can have 64 virtual machines per node. I don't know what the virtual network interface limitations are but I'd imagine it would be a similar number.
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The interface names in HyperV are simply de0, de1, de2, etc.
I believe to have hit the maximum number of virtual NICs in HyperV for one virtual server instance once with 7 networking interfaces. Not too sure about it though.